What We Have Heard from the Beginning: The Past, Present and Future of Johannine Studies

11: Response: The Beyond Beckons

210 FRANCIS J. MOLONEY, S.D.B. I wonder if, in the future, Johannine Studies will continue to focus on the text itself and to pay attention to the world that produced the text. My reading is based upon a world behind the text that is at least Greco– Roman, Jewish, pre–Gnostic, early Christian, and early Johannine. The ability of the author to marry all these cultural and religious traditions into a coherent and compelling narrative is a sign of genius. The early reception of this Gospel was in doubt because of that genius. It was so different from everything else in early Christian tradition and played too easily into the hands of the Gnostics. It continues to be a fascinating and troublesome Christian text for the same reason. To what extent will the world in front of the text determine future Johannine interpretation? I have no doubt that my world (in front of the text) has been influential on my reading of the Fourth Gospel. I have no difficulty with interpretive stances that are increasingly influenced by culture , postcolonialism, feminism, womanism, and the many other “–isms” that arouse passion. I do have difficulty with a future that loses touch with the world behind the text, the world of the text, and the two thousand years of tradition that have given us the Fourth Gospel as a major book within the Christian Scriptures. As Peter Rabinowitz has warned: [O]nce you take seriously the notion that readers ‘construct’ (even partially) the texts that they read, then the canon (any canon) is not (or not only) the product of the inherent qualities in the text; it is also (at least partly) the product of particular choices by the arbiters of taste who create it—choices always grounded in ideological and cultural values, always enmeshed in class, race and gender. (1989, 94) From where I stand, the Fourth Gospel and the tradition that has delivered this text to the third millennium deserves better than that (Moloney 2005b, 19–39). 211 Frank Moloney’s paper succinctly chronicles the history of Catholic biblical scholarship in the last century. Following Pius XII’s encyclical in 1943, Catholic biblical scholars were free to engage in the historical– critical methods pioneered by Protestant scholars from the nineteenth century. In many ways, the 1940s and 1950s were an exciting “wake up” in the Catholic biblical community, and priests from around the world descended upon Rome and Jerusalem to acquire new skills of interpretation . At the same time that the Catholic world was beginning to reap the benefits of this historical–critical research, women and men in the Protestant tradition were already appreciating its limitations and moving into narrative criticism. In Johannine Studies, Moloney was one of the first Catholic scholars to take the plunge into these new narrative waters in his three–volume narrative commentary on John. These works were later crystallized in his Sacra Pagina commentary on John, displaying the convergence of both historical and narrative–critical methods. As one of Moloney’s graduate and doctoral students, I received my biblical training in both historical and narrative methodologies. When contemplating the vast repertoire of Johannine scholarship of the twentieth century, new entrants into this field may well ask, “What’s left to do?” Brown and Martyn have opened up the “world behind the text” with 11: Response THE BEYOND BECKONS Mary Coloe 212 MARY COLOE their historical–critical methods. Culpepper and Moloney have shed light on the “world within the text” through narrative criticism. Segovia and Kysar are making forays into the “world in front of the text.” Where do we go from here? What is “the beyond” that Moloney’s title intimates? Without naming them explicitly, I believe Moloney’s paper does indicate some critical issues for future Johannine research. I will describe these issues under the heading “hermeneutics,” a word I did not hear in my undergraduate studies. What are we doing when we seek to find the meaning of the text and where do we think this meaning lies? Moloney’s essay describes well the development of a variety of methodologies that the modern scholar can draw upon in engaging the biblical text, but these methods and skills need to be placed at the service of a self–conscious understanding of what we do when we interpret a text and the type of text that we are interpreting. Knowing what we...